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The Reuter Society is a social network for former employees of Reuters or Thomson Reuters. The original Society was founded as a London-based club in 1990. The Reuter Society of America was launched in New York in 2014.

It tasted like turpentine but local wine - yes, Afghan wine - was on offer for a succession of correspondents visiting Kabul in the days before the Taliban. The Intercontinental hotel, a watchpost on a hill and a comfortable refuge from the dust of the city, was a haven, a nest of spies and a hang-out for propagandists.

The bars of Saigon were home for two generations of war correspondents, the reporters who covered the French and American conflicts. They offered an essential interlude between forays out of the city to the battlefields of Vietnam. Some of them were hotel bars, others back street dives. The older ones, like the Continental and the Majestic, figured in novels of the French Indochina War, by writers such as Graham Greene and Jean Lartéguy. Later the Caravelle became the American media headquarters. One of the attractions of the most popular bars was their rooftop location: at times of crisis in the city they became vantage points for viewing the action. Now they are luxury leisure scenes for rich tourists.

News

Problems with Thomson Reuters' flawed new flagship desktop platform, part of a $1 billion technology upgrade, have been highlighted in an internal memo that acknowledges faults and goes some way to explaining why it has not been a runaway hit with financial professionals.

Thomson Reuters staff prepared for client questions following its main rival's launch of a new flagship market data service. David Craig, who heads the financial & risk business that includes Reuters news agency, circulated a list of customer talking points following the announcement.

There is a strong commitment to news within Thomson Reuters but things are going to be tight in 2013 given the environment the group's financial clients are operating in, Reuters editor-in-chief Stephen Adler said on Thursday.

Thomson Reuters said on Wednesday it has been recognised as Best Data Provider to the Sell Side at the Sell-Side Technology Awards 2014. The awards are designed to highlight leading technologies and third party providers to the sell side and are voted on by a panel of judges made up of senior sell-side professionals and Waters magazine staff.

Reuters has reprimanded three editors for failing to tell their superiors that the home of a colleague had been raided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Talking Biz News said on Monday it had confirmed the reprimands from multiple sources.

Thomson Reuters has scored a key win for its Eikon sales campaign " the company's flagship desktop terminal will roll out to the European Central Bank and 18 participating national central banks across Europe.

Kenneth Li, pictured, global editor of Reuters.com until he received a sharp management rebuke earlier this year, leaves the organisation today, the latest in a long line of Reuters people to go in its current round of five per cent headcount reduction. Many have been offered buyouts.

Thomson Reuters' flagship desktop terminal Eikon, upgraded in January after disappointing sales since its launch in September 2010, has reached 50,000 installations ready for billing " but take-up in the Americas remains sluggish.

Thomson Reuters is looking for a new London base and is in talks on two potential sites. It has instructed a property firm to find up to 700,000 square feet (65,000 square metres) of office space " one of the biggest requirements in the British capital since the downturn.

Thomson Reuters is gearing up for what markets division chief Devin Wenig calls Reuters' first proper product launch - a new flagship platform for financial products for the Google, YouTube and Twitter generation.

The business founded by Paul Julius Reuter 161 years ago is facing an unprecedented identity crisis, with the relative value of breaking news diminishing, Reuters' financial customers retrenching and a string of operational mis-steps since the company was taken over five years ago by the Thomson group, The Independent said on Wednesday.

Reuters appointed chief financial officer Claudia Palmer (photo) as chief commercial officer following a period in which she held the role on an interim basis after the resignation of chief executive Andrew Rashbass last April.

Thomson Reuters named James Powell as its chief technology officer. He replaces Michael Wilens who is leaving to head asset management at Fidelity Investments. At Thomson Reuters Wilens was executive vice president for strategy, technology and innovation.

Gerald Ratzin, who as a correspondent scored what he remembered as a bittersweet scoop on the death of a United Nations secretary-general in Africa half a century ago, died at home in London on Sunday after a long illness. He was 79.

Thomson Reuters has been formally granted the right to use the name Thomson Reuters as a trade mark in India six years after the merger that formed the company and nearly seven years after filing its application.

Former correspondent Gilbert Sedbon, who served Reuters for 48 years, was buried near Paris on Thursday in the presence of former colleagues who together represented an aggregate of several centuries' service to Reuters. Some had been managers for entire continents; others had stayed in the Paris bureau throughout their careers as invaluable office assistants, Bernard Edinger writes. All were linked equally by their affection for their former colleague, who died on Saturday aged 94.

Thomson Reuters shares are still not cheap but the attractive dividend yield, solid cash flow and ongoing share buybacks should support the stock price, the Motley Fool said in an analysis of last week's 2013 Q4 results.

Bloomberg increased its dominance over Thomson Reuters in 2013 as more clients preferred its $20,000-a-year terminal, a US analyst said. The Reuters brand has been downgraded under Thomson ownership while Bloomberg is on the up and up, another analyst said.

Reuters editor-in-chief Stephen Adler, pictured, on Tuesday reiterated the agency's commitment to independent, unbiased, on-the-ground journalism, said Thomson Reuters is committed to the news operation, and unveiled plans "that respond to, and anticipate, changes brought about by new technologies, new user behaviors, new competitors, and new global business realities".

Reuters has struck deals with The New York Times and global political polling and market researcher Ipsos aimed at delivering best-in-class content on two big stories in 2014 " the winter Olympics and US elections respectively.

Reuters closed its Editorial Reference Unit, known to hundreds of journalists as Edref, on Friday and the senior researcher who ran it, David Cutler, left the company after 25 years along with many of the editors he had helped.

Thomson Reuters continued to occupy the top spot in all major data markets in Europe, the Middle East and Africa in 2012 but lost significant market share to Bloomberg over the past five years, according to a research report.

The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism is preparing to mark 30 years of engagement with hundreds of journalists from around the world. A three-day event at Oxford University, where the Institute is located, will include a memorial lecture, seminars, and a celebratory dinner.

It started with a grant at a time when giving did not figure on the owners' agenda. Most of them were more interested in exploiting their stakes in what had become an increasingly valuable but tantalisingly illiquid asset. They wanted cash for their own individual business purposes.

Analysts at Canadian investment bank TD Securities boosted their target price for Thomson Reuters shares to C$35 from C$33 in a note issued to investors on Wednesday. The firm currently has a Hold rating on the stock.

Investors in Thomson Reuters, whose shares remain 13 per cent below where they were when the merger closed in April 2008 and whose sales growth is in doubt, may soon decide to pull the plug, The Wall Street Journal said on Wednesday.

Thomson Reuters has shown that it has a steady business even in turmoil, and the worst is likely behind the company in the Financial & Risk division, Bank of America Merrill Lynch said in a research report ahead of fourth quarter and full year results due next Wednesday.

The Thomson Reuters merger has not lived up to the expectations of either consumers or shareholders and instead, like so many mergers and acquisitions, it has turned into a sorry tale of upheaval, clashes and disappointments, a London-based editor said on Wednesday.

Thomson Reuters' next chief executive James Smith, pictured, on Friday set out his priorities for the company when he takes over from Tom Glocer on 1 January and said Thursday's announcement was the beginning of the end of a turbulent period of executive changes.

Retrenchments on Wall Street are likely to hurt the market for financial data, intensifying competition between Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters, The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. Steps the two firms took to diversify in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis are being tested.

For the second time in four days, a Canadian brokerage has downgraded Thomson Reuters' price target. Royal Bank of Canada's brokerage RBC Dominion Securities also removed its outperform rating and said the group's markets division may not deliver five per cent revenue growth next year.

Are foreign correspondents redundant? This is the question addressed by a new research paper on the changing face of international news, commissioned by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Oxford University, and written by visiting fellow Richard Sambrook, former BBC director of global news.

Deutsche Bank analysts downgraded Thomson Reuters shares to hold from buy, saying that the markets division - which contains the financial and media businesses - continues to struggle. In a research note to investors, the bank kept its $42 price target for the stock.

Thomson Reuters is somewhat vulnerable to competition, something that will become much more apparent if the company falters again as it did with the botched release four years ago of its latest financial data and trading desktop product, Eikon, The Motley Fool said.

Thomson Reuters has been given an A- credit rating by investment analysis firm Morningstar. The rating suggests that the company is a low default risk. Analysts also gave the stock a three star rating.

Thomson Reuters has lost the exclusive right to issue a closely-watched consumer confidence survey whose early release for a fee to selected clients was investigated by the New York attorney general. It will be replaced from January by Bloomberg, which has said it will discontinue the practice.

Reuters editor-in-chief Stephen Adler (photo) told staff of more imminent job cuts and said that, in "dizzyingly fast" changing market conditions, resources within the agency had to be shifted to areas where promising growth opportunities are seen.

Peter Mosley (photo), 79, who died in hospital on Wednesday after a brief illness, was a Reuters correspondent and editor who covered stories that included the assassination of President Kennedy, the Apollo moon landing programme, and the Soweto riots which led eventually to the collapse of apartheid in South Africa.

Thomson Reuters shares closed more than three per cent lower on Thursday after the company's latest earnings report missed forecasts and investors showed concern that a measure of financial clients' future demand declined for the first time in almost three years.

Artificial intelligence technology is to be rolled out more widely in media organisations and has the potential to replace "hundreds" of journalists at Thomson Reuters alone, according to an academic study.

Reuters owner Thomson Reuters reported higher than expected first-quarter earnings and revenue and reaffirmed its full-year outlook of low single-digit sales growth after improved results across all of its businesses.

Media literacy has never been more important, Reuters editor-in-chief Stephen Adler (photo) said on Tuesday, and journalists have an obligation to help people distinguish between accurate and inaccurate information.

Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism announced Reuters has won its prestigious John B Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism for an investigation into lead poisoning across America.